Snapchat’s My AI – A Youthful Playground or a Privacy Nightmare?

19

October

2023

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A post on this very blog site from 2018 called Snapchat a platform in decline, and I agree with that statement. Not since my high school years have I regularly used Snapchat to communicate with someone. After a long period of inactivity and countless notifications piling up, I decided to open the app some months back and was met with a notification about updates to their Privacy Policy. At that moment I did not give it much attention, just agreed to the terms, and went to the user interface. A new feature at the top of the Chat function caught my eye, My AI.
My AI is a customizable, user friendly, engaging AI chatbot and is one among the many actions Snapchat has undertaken to regain their popularity. Remember those times when you opened Snapchat and disappointedly closed it, no new notifications and no one to talk to? My AI solves that issue, giving constant company to you in the form of information and entertainment, designed to better understand and cater your preferences. It is effectively your AI best friend, but less transactional than other AIs.

I don’t know if it was curiosity or boredom, but my mind immediately raced back to the updated Privacy Policy and I decided to give the whole thing a read. As of 15th August 2023, their new Privacy Policy contains some important changes. A major change here is expanding the amount and type of data Snapchat stores, most recently including conversations with My AI. This is on top of all the information Snapchat already amasses from their users, such as usage, content, device, and location information. “But every social media platform personalizes their user experience and employs targeted advertising?”, you might say. Point noted, which is why I moved on to how this data is being used by their affiliate companies. The screenshot below is the only information I could find, and clicking on the link would only lead me into an endless loop within the Privacy Policy statement.  

If I still haven’t been able to make you raise your eyebrows, I urge you to recognize Snapchat’s target group: teenagers.
Did your fourteen-year-old self have the same level of digital maturity and behavior that you currently possess? Did you truly understand the extent to which your data is collected, let alone the fact that this data determines the content you interact with on a platform? And finally, consider the rationale of using Snapchat: Why send pictures or texts that are deleted after being opened unless you do not want them to be saved? Other than by Snapchat, of course.

Attached below is the help my AI best friend on Snapchat provided me about a ‘common’ problem for teenagers. Make of that what you will.

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Using Midjourney to recreate lost memories

18

October

2023

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Midjourney is a generative AI program which can convert simple natural language prompts into high-quality images. If you have an idea which you can pen (or rather type) down for the program, it will visualize it for you.

Right around the time the hype for this newly launched AI was building up I was finishing my exchange semester in Madrid, and like any other exchange student I made some stupid mistakes. My first mistake was to drop my phone from the fourth-floor balcony during New Year’s Eve. My second mistake was not making sure all my phone pictures are backed up on the cloud when I went to the repair store the next morning, still half dizzy.  It was merely coincidental that during the two days my phone was kept at the store, I was bombarded with AI generated pictures on photography communities online. Upon further research, I found out that these were being created by inputting prompts into Midjourney. All you needed was a Discord account.

Thus, when I received my newly formatted phone back only to realize that all my pictures from the past six months of exchange have vanished, I decided to give Midjourney a try. Crestfallen that I had lost so many memories, I wanted these images to be as realistic as possible. The free version gives you 25 prompt tries, so I researched on the science behind these text prompts to make the most out of those tries. You enter “/imagine” into the text field and voila, you can describe your image.

Midjourney prompt text field

Using a bit of trial and error and building upon what I read on the Internet, here are some general ideas which helped me recreate the images of my choice:

  • The more detailed the description, the better your image results usually are.
  • Make use of commas, they act as soft breaks to your image description.
  • Adding weights to your words, such as 0.5 or mentioning the axis ratio such as “–ar 16:9” can enhance the results.

Example of a typical Midjourney prompt

You can find the results of my journey with Midjourney below, which I believe are quite impressive. The only aspect where Midjourney struggled back when I made these pictures was recreating realistic humanistic features, this being continuously improved and functioning even better now. Whether AI generated images pose a threat to the professionals in the field is a matter of the consumer’s demand, and I have no opinions on that because the creative industry seems like an irrational vortex to me. However, I can definitely see photographers, film studios, and creatives making use of such programs for conceptualization, innovation and maximizing their creative potential.

What do you think?

AI recreation of my lost 2022 camera roll

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